Poems Under Saturn: Poemes Saturniens
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Poems Under Saturn / Poèmes saturniens the lockert library of poetry in translation Editorial advisor: Richard Howard For other titles in the Lockert Library, see p. 153 Poems Under Saturn / Poèmes saturniens Paul Verlaine Translated and with an Introduction by Karl Kirchwey PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton and Oxford Copyright 2011 © by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket art: Léon Frédéric, L’intérieur d’atelier (detail). © Collection Musée d’Ixelles, Brussels. Photo by Mixed Media. All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Verlaine, Paul, 1844–1896 [Poèmes saturniens. English] Poems under Saturn = Poèmes saturniens/Paul Verlaine ; translated [from the French] by Karl Kirchwey. p. cm. — (The Lockert Library of poetry in translation) ISBN 978-0-691-14485-6 (cloth: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-691-14486-3 (pbk. : alk.paper) 1. Verlaine, Paul, 1844–1896—Translations into English. I. Kirchwey, Karl, 1956– II. Title. PQ2463.P5713 2011 841'.8–dc22 2010016440 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation is supported by a bequest from Charles Lacy Lockert (1888–1974) This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Designed and composed by Tracy Baldwin Printed on acid-free paper. e Printed in the United States of America 10987654321 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix Les Sages d’autrefois / The ancient Sages 2 Prologue 5 Melancholia / Melancholia 15 I. Résignation / Resignation 16 II. Nevermore / Nevermore 18 III. Après trois ans / After Three Years 20 IV. Vœu / Wish 22 V. Lassitude / Lassitude 24 VI. Mon rêve familier / My Familiar Dream 26 VII. À une femme / To a Woman 28 VIII. L’angoisse / Dread 30 Eaux-fortes / Etchings 33 I. Croquis parisien / Parisian Sketch 34 II. Cauchemar / Nightmare 36 III. Marine / Marine 40 IV. Effet de nuit / Night Effect 42 V. Grotesques / Grotesques 44 Paysages tristes / Sad Landscapes 49 I. Soleils couchants / Sunsets 50 II. Crépuscule du soir mystique / Mystical Dusk 52 III. Promenade sentimentale / Sentimental Stroll 54 IV. Nuit du Walpurgis classique / Classic Walpurgisnacht 56 V. Chanson d’automne / Autumn Song 60 VI. L’heure du berger / Evening Star 62 VII. Le rossignol / The Nightingale 64 Caprices / Caprices 67 I. Femme et chatte / Woman and Pussy 68 II. Jésuitisme / Jesuitism 70 III. La chanson des ingénues / The Song of the Ingenues 72 IV. Une grande dame / A Great Lady 76 V. Monsieur Prudhomme / Mister Wiseman 78 Autres poèmes / Other Poems 81 Initium / Initium 82 Çavitrî/Savitri 84 Sub Urbe / Sub Urbe 86 Sérénade / Serenade 90 Un dahlia / A Dahlia 94 Nevermore / Nevermore 96 Il bacio / Il bacio 98 Dans les bois / In the Woods 100 Nocturne parisien / Parisian Nocturne 102 Marco / Marco 110 César Borgia / Cesare Borgia 116 La mort de Philippe II / The Death of Philip II 118 Épilogue / Epilogue 135 Notes 145 vi Acknowledgments The French text (included hereen face) is that provided by Project Gutenberg and has been cross-checked against the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition Verlaine: Oeuvres poétiques complètes (1962). The introduction and critical notes assembled by Martine Bercot in the Livre de Poche edition of the Poèmes saturniens (1996) are invaluable and a model of textual scholarship. I have relied on her notes frequently in my own, and have acknowledged them. The notes by Le Dantec and Borel in the Pléiade edition are also helpful. I would like to thank Christine Couffin, Michèle Champag- nat, Cathérine Dana, and Bryn Mawr College Professor of French (Emeritus) Mario Maurin for their help with this translation. Hanne Winarsky, Literature Editor of Princeton University Press, was loyal to this project even in its earliest (and roughest) stages. “Parisian Sketch,” “Nightmare,” “Jesuitism,” and “The Song of the Ingénues,” together with the Introduction, appeared (in ear- lier versions) in the Spring 2008 issue of Parnassus: Poetry in Re- view, and I would also like to thank Herbert Leibowitz and Ben Downing for their encouragement. “Resignation,” “After Three Years,” “Night Effect,” “Sentimental Stroll,” “Mister Wiseman,” “Serenade,” and “Marco” appeared in the inaugural issue of Little Star (Spring 2011), and thanks are due to Ann Kjellberg, editor of that journal, for her interest. This translation is dedicated to the memory of Colette Brèque. vii This page intentionally left blank Introduction In the late summer of 2006, I began to translate a few favorite early Verlaine poems. This innocent amusement somehow became an obsession—and a kind of love affair. What has by now become a complete translation of Verlaine’s first book, thePoèmes satur- niens (Poems Under Saturn) of 1866—so far as I know the only complete translation of the book in English—began with two motivations common to most, if not all, translations: admiration for the original work, and a certain impatience with the existing translations. Of the former I shall say more in a moment. The Verlaine translations I knew first were those by C. F. MacIntyre (dating from 1948), which have long been standard in English. Yet I came to feel that these somehow condescend, both to Verlaine and to the contemporary reader, in a way that simply would not do. They also ride on now-unaccountable com- placencies of culture and gender, even after we make allowances for those present in the original. “How fresh and adolescent the whole poem is!” MacIntyre exclaims at one point; elsewhere, he speaks of “Those lovely girls of one’s first fine flush of rapture!” Often, in his attempt to preserve Verlaine’s rhymes, MacIntyre sacrifices syntax or diction or both, and includes padding, as do later translations of Verlaine by Doris-Jeanne Gourévitch (1970). Joanna Richardson’s translations (1974) alternate between free verse and metrical verse, though meter shapes some of her best lines. Her commitment to rhyme is similarly variable. Among contemporary translations, Norman Shapiro’s (1999) are probably the most successful, but like the other translators men- tioned so far, he is trying to represent the whole span of Verlaine’s work in a single volume. ix Martin Sorrell’s translations in the Oxford World’s Clas- sics series also date from 1999. These are, however, unrhymed, and indeed, the translator declares that “the worst tyranny for any translator of Verlaine was rhyme” (p. xxx) By taking it for granted that rhyme “does not anyway have such a strong place in modern English prosody,” Sorrell clears the way for his own free verse translations. But in fact rhyme is alive and well in both contemporary English and American poetry, and ignoring it in the hopes of sounding more “contemporary” seems too easy. Furthermore, in a “critique” of the Poèmes saturniens he wrote in 1890 at the time of the reissue of his first book, Verlaine speaks of those who would accuse him of “timidity” with regard to vers libre, and retorts, “My God, I thought I had smashed verse enough, I thought I had freed it enough, if you like, in displacing the caesura as much as possible, and with regard to rhyme, mak- ing use of it with discretion, though, without constraining myself much to employ either pure assonances or inconsiderately exces- sive types of echo.” (“Mon Dieu, j’ai cru avoir assez brisé le vers, l’avoir assez affranchi, si vous préférez, en déplaçant la césure le plus possible, et quant à la rime, m’en être servi avec quelque judi- ciaire pourtant, en ne m’astreignant pas trop, soit à de pures asso- nances, soit à des formes de l’écho indiscrètement excessives.” Le Dantec/Borel, 1074.) From this point of view, the use of rhyme is an actual imperative if the translator is to remain faithful to Verlaine’s original and to its innovation. I felt, therefore, that there was room for a fresh attempt, and one that would restore some of these often-anthologized poems to their original context in Verlaine’s first book. Robert Bly has remarked that “the best translation resembles a Persian rug seen x from the back—the pattern is apparent, but not much more” (Bly, 48). In thinking about what part of Verlaine’s “pattern” to concentrate on first, I was guided by my own practice of thirty years in writing and publishing poems in English, and decided that I would preserve, poem by poem, Verlaine’s diverse schemes of end-rhyme. Bly further opines that “I believe in working as much as possible with internal rhymes, but I think it’s best not to insist on reproducing end rhymes... .the translator has to add images that destroy the poem’s integrity” (Bly, 44). How- ever, I resolved that I would seek to avoid both such padding of images and the earlier translators’ compromises of syntax, while trying to preserve an English language diction infused with as much as possible of the range of the French original, which as I understand it mines high and low, academic and colloquial. As Paul Valéry remarks of Verlaine, “His verse, free and moving between the extremes of language, dares stoop from the most delicately musical tone to prose, sometimes to the basest of prose, which he borrows and adopts deliberately” (“Son vers, libre et mobile entre les extrêmes du langage, ose descendre du ton le plus délicatement musical jusqu’à la prose, parfois à la pire des proses, qu’il emprunte et qu’il épouse délibérément”; Valéry, 183). There is a striking lexical energy in this book, and, without being seduced by false cognates, the translator must rejoice at the opportunity to carry into English words like “bister” (“bis- tre”), “amaranth” (“amarante”), or “wyvern” (“guivre”).